The White Tiger

My curiousity about this book was first aroused, predictably enough, when it won the Man Booker Prize. I have read both positive and negative comments on the book, the most striking of them being "How can a page turner like this win a Booker?"
Sad, but true. Page turners sell the most but are the bottom of the heap, relegated to airport terminals and the occasional reader who picks up a book when all other timepass options have been exhausted. Which brings me to: What does winning a Booker tell you about the book, anyway? As the saying goes, one man's nectar is another's poison.
But I digress. This post is about the book, not what it won.

For a non-Indian, the book may be a revelation: Yes, there is an India beyond the traffic clogged roads, the spanking new and tall buildings coming up at an amazing pace (Wish I could say the same for the flyovers and the Bangalore metro!) and the 9% GDP growth. And yes, it's not pretty at all.

For an Indian, it puts to words all the emotions of this other India, the majority India. Mass migration, urbanization, poverty.. the list goes on and on. There are people who accept their fate and spend their lives pulling rickshaws or selling vegetables, and there are people who will not.

To make a point effectively, we have to provide a stark example. Hence the book takes us to one of the places in India where this poor man-rich man difference is as stark as black and white: Rajasthan. Replace the 'Laxmangarh' with a 'Lakhansipur' in UP or a 'Daulatpur' in Bihar and the story could be the same. The poor man is the good guy-turned bad, and the rich guy, when not being cruel or downright arrogant, is confused and utterly lost.
I bet we can write an equally good book on exactly the opposite happening in India: How a good rich man becomes poor and becomes bad, or how a bad poor man becomes good and therefore becomes rich.
One swallow does not a spring make.
Also, I don't think the book speaks of anything that we should be ashamed of as Indians. Indeed, there is an abundance of literature on this topic, but not all of it has won the Man Booker of course, for various reasons. TOI's India Poised campaign was based on it. Shashi Tharoor has talked about it in India: From Midnight to the Millennium. So do, I suspect, Gurcharan Das in India Unbound and Ramachandra Guha in India After Gandhi.
Read it, it'll help you pass a boring weekend afternoon.

Unearthing what is real

It is often said that a person's true character comes out in testing times. We had a tough week recently, and I must admit that the statement rang true. But according to me that is not the major issue. In my opinion, it doesn't take long to find out/predict the reaction of a person to a situation if you have some time with them, either as a part of work or otherwise.
What I was surprised about was the number of people who displayed double standards. Looking outwardly disappointed (and crying - the whole hog, basically) but inwardly rejoicing at their victory, even if it was at the cost of another's loss. Saying something and then doing something completely different. The list goes on and on.
My question is: why is the fake quotient so high today? Is it such a crime, being normal, with faults and opinions that are not popular?
Worse still, how do you remain genuine in this false world? I can't help thinking that the world is like a 5-star hotel. All glitzy, bright and happy on the outside, but delve deeper and you enter dingy and dirty alleyways, buried with secrets and shame.
There are enough and more examples of people getting what they wanted by crooked ways. As the one refusing to compromie on "morals" and "values", you are the loser. Yeah, it is true that at the end of the day you have a clear conscience and are the "true" winner, but sometimes I wonder, are we being too idealistic? There is much to learn, and much to unearth: what is the real real?

Whizzing past

Yup, that's life as it is now. A million things to do and only 24 hours to do them all. It's exhausting and exhilerating at the same time. Never have my multi-tasking abilities been put to such stringent test (Well, yes, I solemnly claim to possess multi-tasking abilities :-) )
Right now I am gazing up at the high branches of the trees in the orchard, trying to distinguish the sweet grapes from the sour. Man, am I confused or what??
Needless to say, my sleep patterns have been completely obliterated in the past year. Now I can sleep anywhere, anytime, because I always have some of it to catch up on!

Doormat

You know that you have been treated like a doormat when:

• You go out of your way to help A and then A yells at you for not doing enough
• You stay up nights looking for a solution to B's problem (which has nothing to do with you)
• Even after clear cut job allocation of a project has been done you spend more than an hour collating the findings and formatting the report (which was actually C's job, but C is 'too tired to work')
  
• At the end of all the fracas you are the most stressed, the most irritated, and you have worked the most

When will I learn??

Why?

One might remember that this was a question that we all asked most frequently as kids: Why?

---
"No, you cannot have that chocolate."
"Why?"
---
"Look, the sea is so big and blue. Beautiful, no?"
"Why is it blue? And big?"
---
"You are a big girl now. You will be going to school soon."
"What is school? Why should I go?"
---

The rest of the story is predictable enough. We went to school. The daily routine of struggling to eat breakfast in the morning, bending over to carry the school bag, struggling to write on the line in class, and finally collapsing on the sofa at home in exhaustion at the end of it all. Most significantly, we stopped asking "Why".
In hindsight, that was the purpose of school. To stop us from asking all those irritating, difficult-to-answer questions. In the race to be the one with the best handwriting, and the first to name all the nine planets (eight, as of today) we concentrated on the has-beens and the "technical details." My school life was largely spent in trying to blend in. So, I became a nobody. A conformist. It took me 2 years in a "hep" college in Bangalore, followed by 4 years in the Rajasthan desert, both environments that offered numerous opportunities, to develop myself. Now, I want to become somebody.

There are, as usual, exceptions to this rule. But that is not the point, right? We want these exceptions to become the rules.

India: From Midnight to the Millennium

In his portrait of one of the world's most important and interesting countries "India: From Midnight to the Millennium", Shashi Tharoor speaks about "a kind of Indian almost unrepresented in Indian politics."

My kind of Indian.

"There are many of us, but, among India's multitudes, we are few. We have grown up in the cities of India, secure in a national identity than a local one, which we express in English rather than any Indian language. We rejoice in the complexity and diversity of our India, of which we feel a conscious part, we have friends of every caste and religious community, and we marry across such sectarian lines. ... We are secular, not in the sense that we are irreligious or unaware of the forces of religion, but in that we believe religion should not determine public policy or individual opportunity.

And, in Indian politics, we are pretty much irrelevant.

We don't get a look in. We don't enter the fray because we can't win. We tell ourselves ruefully that we are able, but not electable. We don't have the votes, there are too few of us, and we don't speak the idiom of the masses. Instead we have learnt to talk about political issues without the expectation that we will be able to do anything about them."

My feelings exactly. A number of incidents led to this conclusion on my part:

1. When I voted for the first time this May I couldn't help wondering how my kind of vote plays any role. No candidate came to my apartments to campaign, although I did see them "waving the wave" in an adjacent lower income locality. The candidates' promises hardly make any difference to me. I would treat them with a kind of indifference bordering on hostility should they approach me at all. Why am I voting? What difference does it make whether I vote or not??

2. As of Q1 2008, the following two movies were declared box-office hits: Jodhaa Akbar and Race. I had only seen the first and did not think it deserved to be a hit. All my friends who saw Race told me that it takes infidelity to dizzying heights and can easily rank amongst the worst movies ever made. I saw Race later, and although I have seen worse movies, if this is a hit, then God save the world. (Race was obviously not made for someone like me. Come to think of it, which movies in the past were made for someone like me and were box office hits?)

Sometimes I am consumed by a feeling of helplessness, followed by guilt for not having the guts to enter the fray and give back to my country by using my education to provide efficient solutions to lingering problems.

Does writing about it help, I wonder.

Obituary

When catastrophe strikes, it does not sound a warning bell in advance. And then it hits you so hard, you reel with the force of it. We mourn the death of the Radio.
There must be over 15 FM Radio channels in Bangalore now. The Radio revolution in Bangalore got a much-needed shot in the arm sometime around 2002, with the debut of Radio City 91.1 FM. The FM station started off with playing English songs, and then gradually introduced some Hindi ones as well. Like any smart enterprise, it was giving its target customers what they wanted: good music, that the target market enjoyed listening to. It wasn't long before fundamental elements attacked and ransacked the Radio City office, yelling that they play Kannada songs as well, coz Bangalore is in Karnataka, and Kannada is the official language. Struck with fear, the station started playing Kannada songs.
The story of the rest of the stations is pretty much the same, maybe without the ransacking part in some cases. (The yelling was always there, I tell you. Always.) Today, all the stations play 10 Kannada songs for every 1 non-Kannada song. Now, I have been in Bangalore all my life, and I can tell you with reasonable confidence that the ratio of the Kannada speaking to the non-Kannada speaking population is definitely not in the proportion mentioned above. Also, for any company, the best thing about competition is that it forces you to differentiate yourself, to offer the target customer a melange of music that is unique to the station. Sadly, this is also missing in the existing scenario. All of them play the same songs, the RJs speak in the same fake happy way and worst of all, there is more of talking than music.
For the Radio: May your soul rest in peace.